Associate Director Penelope Van Tuyl participates in panel on human rights fact-finding

The Handa Center's Associate Director, Penelope Van Tuyl, recently took part in a panel on the effects of social media and misinformation campaigns on human rights fact-finding. The discussion was part of a conference in Washington, DC, hosted by the University of Notre Dame's Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights, which featured keynote speaker, Dr. Agnès Callamard, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions.

"Of course there’s nothing new about lying or propaganda, and to the extent that it’s new, it’s the network nature of it. It’s the amplification of the ability of the individual to access those means to spread,” Van Tuyl said. “But of course with that amplification capacity comes the capacity to combat that."

She highlighted the difficulties facing governments in the era of globalization. "It seems like we're in a moment where so many globalized practices….outpace and stretch beyond the capacity of any one single state to regulate, and government structures seem often ill-prepared to effectively understand that which they need to regulate."